MyFax (spring 2011)

If you need to fax but don't need a fax machine, MyFax lets you send and receive faxes from the web or by email. It's not easy on the eyes, but it has an excellent selection of international fax numbers.

Pros

Cons

No free version.
Doesn't work with Firefox.
Convoluted Web interface.
So-so quality on received faxes.

Bottom Line

MyFax offers a solid, no-frills fax service.
It makes the most sense for SOHO users who just want to send and receive faxes via e-mail.

1 Mar 2018Jeffrey L. Wilson

Fax machines are now becoming rare, but faxing is sometimes still necessary. Online fax services like MyFax save you from having to invest in (or pay to use) a fax machine by letting you send and receive faxes from the web or via your email client. MyFax is affordable, simple, and flexible. It even offers toll-free and international numbers, which makes it convenient to use when you're dealing with business partners all over the world. Its interface, however, is clunky and difficult to use. We recommend Editors' Choice winner HelloFax instead.

(Editors' Note: MyFax is owned by j2 Global, the parent company of PCMag's publisher, Ziff Davis.)

Pricing and Features

The least expensive MyFax pricing tier costs $10 per month and allows 100 outgoing pages and 200 incoming pages. You can save a little money with the annual plan for this tier, which costs $110 per year, or $9.17 per month. The next tier, at $20 per month, lets you send 200 pages and receive 200 pages (that's right, there's only a bump to sent faxes at this tier). For $40 per month you get 400 incoming pages and 400 outgoing pages. If you happen to go over your page limit, each extra page costs 10 cents, which is an average fee among the services we've tested. MyFax also offers enterprise-level support for larger companies, but you have to contact the company for pricing.

I prefer fax services like HelloFax that offer a pool of pages with instead of distinguishing between sent and received messages. If, for example, you only send faxes and never receive them, having a pool means that you can use all of your faxes before you start incurring overage fees. If your pool were split in half, you'd reach overage territory twice as fast in this case.

If you're not sure about MyFax, the service offers a 30-day free trial. You do, however, have to enter your credit card details to activate the trial period. HelloFax and Biscom 1-2-3 do not require credit card information for their free trials, which I appreciate.

Notably, HelloFax offers a pay-as-you-go, send-only model once its free trial expires. If you only send the occasional fax, this is a handy option. In this mode, HelloFax costs just 99 cents per fax.

MyFax's pricing plan is squarely in the middle of the competition. Competitor eFax (also owned by j2 Global, PCMag's parent company) offers two tiers, $16.95 and $19.95, for 150 and 200 pages each of inbound and outgoing faxes, respectively. That's already a significantly higher cost than MyFax. Keep in mind, also, that while MyFax doesn't charge a setup fee, eFax bills you $10 just for setting up a basic account or $19 at the higher tier. eFax also charges 10 cents per additional page after you reach your limit.

Like eFax, Send2Fax (also owned by j2 Global) has a monthly fee of $11.99, but it spares you the setup fee. It doesn't pull any punches with overage charges, however. If you exceed Send2Fax's allowance of 300 combined inbound and outbound faxes, you'll pay 12 cents per page—the highest overage rate I've seen for a paid service. Those pennies can add up fast if you do a lot of faxing.

Nextiva vFAX, on the other hand, has one of the lowest monthly fees and overage charges of the fax services I have reviewed. It costs a mere $8.95 per month (just $4.95 with an annual commitment), and that entitles you to 500 sent or received pages. If you go over that allotment, it's only 3 cents per extra page. But Nextiva does not let you choose an international or toll free fax number. It also requires Flash to operate, which is unfortunate, as Flash has been deprecated in most modern browsers.

Heavy fax users may find that RingCentral Fax is a better option. That service starts at $14.99 per month and offers an unmatched 750 pages. You can also opt to upgrade the service to unlock all of RingCentral's VoIP features.

If cost is a factor for you and you don't do a lot of international business, you should consider MetroFax, which is also owned by j2 Global. It costs only $7.95 per month (or $6.63 per month with an annual commitment), provides 500 total sent and received faxes, and only charges 3 cents per page if you exceed that amount. That's the lowest up-front cost and overage fee I've found. It's a bare-bones service, however.

Simple Setup

Your journey with MyFax begins with selecting a fax number. You can import an existing number, choose a toll-free number, or search for a local number by ZIP code, city, or state. Note that choosing a toll-free or international number does not cost extra. The service currently supports US and Canadian numbers, along with dozens of other countries. A MyFax representative told me that the exact number of countries the service supports changes from day to day. HelloFax, our Editors' Choice, is deficient in this one regard, as it only supports fax numbers in Canada, the UK, and the US.

After I keyed in my test credentials, I received an email with a confirmation link and the password generated by MyFax. I don't like the fact that MyFax emailed my password to me in plaintext. That's simply not a secure way to operate, and it seems like an easy problem to fix. After several years of reviewing the service and commenting on the problem, I'm sorry to see that the issue persists. It is, at least, a complex password with numbers, special characters, and mixed-case letters. That's better than eFax, however, which generates a four-digit passcode, and sends it in plaintext.

In practice, finding a fax number in your desired area code can be tricky. For example, MyFax offered me no 212 area code phone numbers, so instead I opted for a 917 number. MyFax simply may not have your number of choice. Finding an international number is even harder. The list of countries is extensive, but MyFax had no available numbers in some of the countries it listed during my testing. I contacted the company who confirmed that number availability changes frequently. That's fine, but it would be nice to see this reflected in the number selection process.

Sending and Receiving Faxes

Most people will probably interact with MyFax through their email clients. Received faxes arrive as regular emails with the faxed content attached as a PDF. To send a fax via email, just type a fax number into the address field, add "@myfax.com" to the end of the number, and attach a file.

If all you're interested in is a fax-to-email integration, Biscom 1-2-3 focuses only on email and skips the web portal. However, it's stingy with the monthly page allowance, and doesn't offer toll-free numbers or porting existing numbers.

By default, MyFax faxes arrive in the PDF format, but you can change this to TIFF if you choose. You can add four additional email addresses that can receive the incoming faxes, and you can also toggle among multiple fax numbers from a single interface.

The MyFax web interface is identical to that of eFax and MetroFax. These closely resemble webmail services from the early 2000s. It's a familiar experience, but it's also archaic, and doesn't engender a lot of confidence. Also like eFax, MyFax has the unusual quirk of greatly shrinking the fax preview at the bottom of the screen to the point that I almost overlooked it. These services need a UI makeover, as I've been saying for years. HelloFax, on the other hand, has an excellent, modern-looking interface that is a pleasure to use.

Despite my complaints about MyFax's appearance, sending a fax through the web portal is very simple, taking just a few clicks. That's far better than the five pages of tedium Nextiva requires you to slog through just to send a single fax.

One difference between eFax and MyFax is that the latter lacks a digital signature feature. With eFax, you fax the image of your signature to yourself and use a built-in tool to crop and save the signature for later use. You can then append it to documents to be signed and fax them on their way. HelloFax also lets you sign documents, but it includes a much more powerful editor. MyFax lacks these features, but it's not a great loss, as many PDF forms can be edited directly on your computer or mobile device. Still, it's nice to have them built into the fax service.

As with other services, MyFax stores all of your faxes indefinitely. If you fax a lot, that could make for a crowded inbox. To help you make sense of it, MyFax includes a search bar and a tagging tool.

Like eFax and MetroFax, MyFax offers Android and iPhone apps to help you manage your faxing on the go. Neither Send2Fax nor Nextiva vFAX have dedicated mobile apps. Of course, you can also just use a mobile email client, but a dedicated app is by far the better experience.

The Quirks of Doing Business

MyFax and competitors eFax, MetroFax, and Send2Fax are all owned by j2 Global. The web portals for eFax, MyFax, and MetroFax are identical. Only Send2Fax has a different interface, although all the services have different features and pricing structures.

That's not a problem on its own, but I discovered I could not sign up for MyFax with the email I used to enroll with eFax or MetroFax. Doing so generated an error informing me that the email was already in use. It's very unlikely that you'll have the same issue, unless you plan to kick the tires on a bunch of fax services the way I did, so I don't count this against the service's score. You can free up your email from one of these co-owned services to use it with another one, but you'll need to contact customer support to do so. Send2Fax is the sole provider among those owned by j2 Global that did not show this login issue in my testing.

When I tested fax services in the past, I would send faxes between the online service and an actual fax machine. Unfortunately, I discovered this year that PCMag not only no longer has any fax machines, but no functioning phone lines either. If this is a nation-wide move away from copper, it raises the question of how long faxes will remain viable. The death of the fax machine is one thing, but will faxing still make sense if copper lines fall out of use entirely?

At any rate, I completed my testing by sending faxes back and forth between MyFax and another online fax service. I had no trouble doing so.

A Foreign Affair

MyFax provides a simple, reliable faxing experience from start to finish. And while it could use a visual overhaul, it cuts the machine out of faxing. It's especially useful if you need an international fax number. That said, Editors' Choice winner HelloFax has a wonderfully modern interface as well as a host of advanced tools. It's very affordable, and offers a pay-as-you-go option if you're not interested in contracts. Check out HelloFax if you don't require a far-flung fax number.

MyFax

good

Bottom Line: If you need to fax but don't need a fax machine, MyFax lets you send and receive faxes from the web or by email. It's not easy on the eyes, but it has an excellent selection of international fax numbers.

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About the Author

For more than a decade, Jeffrey L. Wilson has penned gadget- and video game-related nerd-copy for a variety of publications, including 1UP, 2D-X, The Cask, Laptop, LifeStyler, Parenting, Sync, Wise Bread, and WWE. He now brings his knowledge and skillset to PCMag as Senior Analyst.

When he isn't staring at a monitor (or two) and churning out Web hosting, music, utilities, and video game copy, Jeffrey mentors, practices Jeet Kune Do, blogs, podcasts, and speaks at the occasional con. He also collects vinyl and greatly enjoys a craft brew.